OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Small Language Models Learn Enhanced Reasoning Skills from Medical Textbooks
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

While recent advancements in commercial large language models (LM) have shown promising results in medical tasks, their closed-source nature poses significant privacy and security concerns, hindering their widespread use in the medical field. Despite efforts to create open-source models, their limited parameters often result in insufficient multi-step reasoning capabilities required for solving complex medical problems. To address this, we introduce Meerkat, a new family of medical AI systems ranging from 7 to 70 billion parameters. The models were trained using our new synthetic dataset consisting of high-quality chain-of-thought reasoning paths sourced from 18 medical textbooks, along with diverse instruction-following datasets. Our systems achieved remarkable accuracy across six medical benchmarks, surpassing the previous best models such as MediTron and BioMistral, and GPT-3.5 by a large margin. Notably, Meerkat-7B surpassed the passing threshold of the United States Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE) for the first time for a 7B-parameter model, while Meerkat-70B outperformed GPT-4 by an average of 1.3%. Additionally, Meerkat-70B correctly diagnosed 21 out of 38 complex clinical cases, outperforming humans' 13.8 and closely matching GPT-4's 21.8. Our systems offered more detailed free-form responses to clinical queries compared to existing small models, approaching the performance level of large commercial models. This significantly narrows the performance gap with large LMs, showcasing its effectiveness in addressing complex medical challenges.
Aurora-M: Open Source Continual Pre-training for Multilingual Language and Code
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Pretrained language models are an integral part of AI applications, but their high computational cost for training limits accessibility. Initiatives such as Bloom and StarCoder aim to democratize access to pretrained models for collaborative community development. Despite these efforts, such models encounter challenges such as limited multilingual capabilities, risks of catastrophic forgetting during continual pretraining, and the high costs of training models from scratch, alongside the need to align with AI safety standards and regulatory frameworks. This paper presents Aurora-M, a 15B parameter multilingual open-source model trained on English, Finnish, Hindi, Japanese, Vietnamese, and code. Continually pretrained from StarCoderPlus on 435B additional tokens, Aurora-M surpasses 2T tokens in total training token count. It is the first open-source multilingual model fine-tuned on human-reviewed safety instructions, thus aligning its development not only with conventional red-teaming considerations, but also with the specific concerns articulated in the Biden-Harris Executive Order on the Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence. We evaluate Aurora-M across a wide range of tasks and languages, showcasing its robustness against catastrophic forgetting and its superior performance in multilingual settings, particularly in safety evaluations. We open-source Aurora-M and its variants to encourage responsible open-source development of large language models at https://huggingface.co/aurora-m.
Automatic explanation of the classification of Spanish legal judgments in jurisdiction-dependent law categories with tree estimators
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Automatic legal text classification systems have been proposed in the literature to address knowledge extraction from judgments and detect their aspects. However, most of these systems are black boxes even when their models are interpretable. This may raise concerns about their trustworthiness. Accordingly, this work contributes with a system combining Natural Language Processing (NLP) with Machine Learning (ML) to classify legal texts in an explainable manner. We analyze the features involved in the decision and the threshold bifurcation values of the decision paths of tree structures and present this information to the users in natural language. This is the first work on automatic analysis of legal texts combining NLP and ML along with Explainable Artificial Intelligence techniques to automatically make the models' decisions understandable to end users. Furthermore, legal experts have validated our solution, and this knowledge has also been incorporated into the explanation process as "expert-in-the-loop" dictionaries. Experimental results on an annotated data set in law categories by jurisdiction demonstrate that our system yields competitive classification performance, with accuracy values well above 90%, and that its automatic explanations are easily understandable even to non-expert users.
Zero-shot Safety Prediction for Autonomous Robots with Foundation World Models
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

A world model creates a surrogate world to train a controller and predict safety violations by learning the internal dynamic model of systems. However, the existing world models rely solely on statistical learning of how observations change in response to actions, lacking precise quantification of how accurate the surrogate dynamics are, which poses a significant challenge in safety-critical systems. To address this challenge, we propose foundation world models that embed observations into meaningful and causally latent representations. This enables the surrogate dynamics to directly predict causal future states by leveraging a training-free large language model. In two common benchmarks, this novel model outperforms standard world models in the safety prediction task and has a performance comparable to supervised learning despite not using any data. We evaluate its performance with a more specialized and system-relevant metric by comparing estimated states instead of aggregating observation-wide error.
Addressing Both Statistical and Causal Gender Fairness in NLP Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Statistical fairness stipulates equivalent outcomes for every protected group, whereas causal fairness prescribes that a model makes the same prediction for an individual regardless of their protected characteristics. Counterfactual data augmentation (CDA) is effective for reducing bias in NLP models, yet models trained with CDA are often evaluated only on metrics that are closely tied to the causal fairness notion; similarly, sampling-based methods designed to promote statistical fairness are rarely evaluated for causal fairness. In this work, we evaluate both statistical and causal debiasing methods for gender bias in NLP models, and find that while such methods are effective at reducing bias as measured by the targeted metric, they do not necessarily improve results on other bias metrics. We demonstrate that combinations of statistical and causal debiasing techniques are able to reduce bias measured through both types of metrics.
Leveraging Pre-trained and Transformer-derived Embeddings from EHRs to Characterize Heterogeneity Across Alzheimer's Disease and Related Dementias
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Alzheimer's disease is a progressive, debilitating neurodegenerative disease that affects 50 million people globally. Despite this substantial health burden, available treatments for the disease are limited and its fundamental causes remain poorly understood. Previous work has suggested the existence of clinically-meaningful sub-types, which it is suggested may correspond to distinct etiologies, disease courses, and ultimately appropriate treatments. Here, we use unsupervised learning techniques on electronic health records (EHRs) from a cohort of memory disorder patients to characterise heterogeneity in this disease population. Pre-trained embeddings for medical codes as well as transformer-derived Clinical BERT embeddings of free text are used to encode patient EHRs. We identify the existence of sub-populations on the basis of comorbidities and shared textual features, and discuss their clinical significance.
Edinburgh Clinical NLP at SemEval-2024 Task 2: Fine-tune your model unless you have access to GPT-4
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

The NLI4CT task assesses Natural Language Inference systems in predicting whether hypotheses entail or contradict evidence from Clinical Trial Reports. In this study, we evaluate various Large Language Models (LLMs) with multiple strategies, including Chain-of-Thought, In-Context Learning, and Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT). We propose a PEFT method to improve the consistency of LLMs by merging adapters that were fine-tuned separately using triplet and language modelling objectives. We found that merging the two PEFT adapters improves the F1 score (+0.0346) and consistency (+0.152) of the LLMs. However, our novel methods did not produce more accurate results than GPT-4 in terms of faithfulness and consistency. Averaging the three metrics, GPT-4 ranks joint-first in the competition with 0.8328. Finally, our contamination analysis with GPT-4 indicates that there was no test data leakage.
Denoising Monte Carlo Renders with Diffusion Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Physically-based renderings contain Monte-Carlo noise, with variance that increases as the number of rays per pixel decreases. This noise, while zero-mean for good modern renderers, can have heavy tails (most notably, for scenes containing specular or refractive objects). Learned methods for restoring low fidelity renders are highly developed, because suppressing render noise means one can save compute and use fast renders with few rays per pixel. We demonstrate that a diffusion model can denoise low fidelity renders successfully. Furthermore, our method can be conditioned on a variety of natural render information, and this conditioning helps performance. Quantitative experiments show that our method is competitive with SOTA across a range of sampling rates. Qualitative examination of the reconstructions suggests that the image prior applied by a diffusion method strongly favors reconstructions that are like real images -- so have straight shadow boundaries, curved specularities and no fireflies.
Designing Robot Identity: The Role of Voice, Clothing, and Task on Robot Gender Perception
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Perceptions of gender are a significant aspect of human-human interaction, and gender has wide-reaching social implications for robots deployed in contexts where they are expected to interact with humans. This work explored two flexible modalities for communicating gender in robots--voice and appearance--and we studied their individual and combined influences on a robot's perceived gender. We evaluated the perception of a robot's gender through three video-based studies. First, we conducted a study (n=65) on the gender perception of robot voices by varying speaker identity and pitch. Second, we conducted a study (n=93) on the gender perception of robot clothing designed for two different tasks. Finally, building on the results of the first two studies, we completed a large integrative video-based study (n=273) involving two human-robot interaction tasks. We found that voice and clothing can be used to reliably establish a robot's perceived gender, and that combining these two modalities can have different effects on the robot's perceived gender. Taken together, these results inform the design of robot voices and clothing as individual and interacting components in the perceptions of robot gender.
Conditional Pseudo-Reversible Normalizing Flow for Surrogate Modeling in Quantifying Uncertainty Propagation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

We introduce a conditional pseudo-reversible normalizing flow for constructing surrogate models of a physical model polluted by additive noise to efficiently quantify forward and inverse uncertainty propagation. Existing surrogate modeling approaches usually focus on approximating the deterministic component of physical model. However, this strategy necessitates knowledge of noise and resorts to auxiliary sampling methods for quantifying inverse uncertainty propagation. In this work, we develop the conditional pseudo-reversible normalizing flow model to directly learn and efficiently generate samples from the conditional probability density functions. The training process utilizes dataset consisting of input-output pairs without requiring prior knowledge about the noise and the function. Our model, once trained, can generate samples from any conditional probability density functions whose high probability regions are covered by the training set. Moreover, the pseudo-reversibility feature allows for the use of fully-connected neural network architectures, which simplifies the implementation and enables theoretical analysis. We provide a rigorous convergence analysis of the conditional pseudo-reversible normalizing flow model, showing its ability to converge to the target conditional probability density function using the Kullback-Leibler divergence. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, we apply it to several benchmark tests and a real-world geologic carbon storage problem.
MIPS at SemEval-2024 Task 3: Multimodal Emotion-Cause Pair Extraction in Conversations with Multimodal Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

This paper presents our winning submission to Subtask 2 of SemEval 2024 Task 3 on multimodal emotion cause analysis in conversations. We propose a novel Multimodal Emotion Recognition and Multimodal Emotion Cause Extraction (MER-MCE) framework that integrates text, audio, and visual modalities using specialized emotion encoders. Our approach sets itself apart from top-performing teams by leveraging modality-specific features for enhanced emotion understanding and causality inference. Experimental evaluation demonstrates the advantages of our multimodal approach, with our submission achieving a competitive weighted F1 score of 0.3435, ranking third with a margin of only 0.0339 behind the 1st team and 0.0025 behind the 2nd team. Project: https://github.com/MIPS-COLT/MER-MCE.git
Creating synthetic energy meter data using conditional diffusion and building metadata
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Advances in machine learning and increased computational power have driven progress in energy-related research. However, limited access to private energy data from buildings hinders traditional regression models relying on historical data. While generative models offer a solution, previous studies have primarily focused on short-term generation periods (e.g., daily profiles) and a limited number of meters. Thus, the study proposes a conditional diffusion model for generating high-quality synthetic energy data using relevant metadata. Using a dataset comprising 1,828 power meters from various buildings and countries, this model is compared with traditional methods like Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks (CGAN) and Conditional Variational Auto-Encoders (CVAE). It explicitly handles long-term annual consumption profiles, harnessing metadata such as location, weather, building, and meter type to produce coherent synthetic data that closely resembles real-world energy consumption patterns. The results demonstrate the proposed diffusion model's superior performance, with a 36% reduction in Frechet Inception Distance (FID) score and a 13% decrease in Kullback-Leibler divergence (KL divergence) compared to the following best method. The proposed method successfully generates high-quality energy data through metadata, and its code will be open-sourced, establishing a foundation for a broader array of energy data generation models in the future.
The Emotional Impact of Game Duration: A Framework for Understanding Player Emotions in Extended Gameplay Sessions
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

Video games have played a crucial role in entertainment since their development in the 1970s, becoming even more prominent during the lockdown period when people were looking for ways to entertain them. However, at that time, players were unaware of the significant impact that playtime could have on their feelings. This has made it challenging for designers and developers to create new games since they have to control the emotional impact that these games will take on players. Thus, the purpose of this study is to look at how a player's emotions are affected by the duration of the game. In order to achieve this goal, a framework for emotion detection is created. According to the experiment's results, the volunteers' general ability to express emotions increased from 20 to 60 minutes. In comparison to shorter gameplay sessions, the experiment found that extended gameplay sessions did significantly affect the player's emotions. According to the results, it was recommended that in order to lessen the potential emotional impact that playing computer and video games may have in the future, game producers should think about creating shorter, entertaining games.
RLGNet: Repeating-Local-Global History Network for Temporal Knowledge Graph Reasoning
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

Temporal Knowledge Graph (TKG) reasoning involves predicting future events based on historical information. However, due to the unpredictability of future events, this task is highly challenging. To address this issue, we propose a multi-scale hybrid architecture model based on ensemble learning, called RLGNet (Repeating-Local-Global History Network). Inspired by the application of multi-scale information in other fields, we introduce the concept of multi-scale information into TKG reasoning. Specifically, RLGNet captures and integrates different levels of historical information by combining modules that process information at various scales. The model comprises three modules: the Repeating History Module focuses on identifying repetitive patterns and trends in historical data, the Local History Module captures short-term changes and details, and the Global History Module provides a macro perspective on long-term changes. Additionally, to address the limitations of previous single-architecture models in generalizing across single-step and multi-step reasoning tasks, we adopted architectures based on Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) and Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLP) for the Local and Global History Modules, respectively. This hybrid architecture design enables the model to complement both multi-step and single-step reasoning capabilities. Finally, to address the issue of noise in TKGs, we adopt an ensemble learning strategy, combining the predictions of the three modules to reduce the impact of noise on the final prediction results. In the evaluation on six benchmark datasets, our approach generally outperforms existing TKG reasoning models in multi-step and single-step reasoning tasks.
Parameter and Data-Efficient Spectral StyleDCGAN
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

We present a simple, highly parameter, and data-efficient adversarial network for unconditional face generation. Our method: Spectral Style-DCGAN or SSD utilizes only 6.574 million parameters and 4739 dog faces from the Animal Faces HQ (AFHQ) dataset as training samples while preserving fidelity at low resolutions up to 64x64. Code available at https://github.com/Aryan-Garg/StyleDCGAN.
Robust Beamforming Design and Antenna Selection for Dynamic HRIS-aided MISO System
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

In this paper, we propose a dynamic hybrid active-passive reconfigurable intelligent surface (HRIS) to enhance multiple-input-single-output (MISO) communications, leveraging the property of dynamically placing active elements. Specifically, considering the impact of hardware impairments (HWIs), we investigate channel-aware configurations of the receive antennas at the base station (BS) and the active/passive elements at the HRIS to improve transmission reliability. To this end, we address the average mean-square-error (MSE) minimization problem for the HRIS-aided MISO system by jointly optimizing the BS receive antenna selection matrix, the reflection phase coefficients, the reflection amplitude matrix, and the mode selection matrix of the HRIS. To overcome the non-convexity and intractability of this problem, we first transform the binary and discrete variables into continuous ones, and then propose a penalty-based exact block coordinate descent (PEBCD) algorithm to alternately solve these subproblems. Numerical simulations demonstrate the significant superiority of our proposed scheme over conventional benchmark schemes.
1-out-of-n Oblivious Signatures: Security Revisited and a Generic Construction with an Efficient Communication Cost
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

1-out-of-n oblivious signature by Chen (ESORIC 1994) is a protocol between the user and the signer. In this scheme, the user makes a list of n messages and chooses the message that the user wants to obtain a signature from the list. The user interacts with the signer by providing this message list and obtains the signature for only the chosen message without letting the signer identify which messages the user chooses. Tso et al. (ISPEC 2008) presented a formal treatment of 1-out-of-n oblivious signatures. They defined unforgeability and ambiguity for 1-out-of-n oblivious signatures as a security requirement. In this work, first, we revisit the unforgeability security definition by Tso et al. and point out that their security definition has problems. We address these problems by modifying their security model and redefining unforgeable security. Second, we improve the generic construction of a 1-out-of-n oblivious signature scheme by Zhou et al. (IEICE Trans 2022). We reduce the communication cost by modifying their scheme with a Merkle tree. Then we prove the security of our modified scheme.
Resource Allocation for Green Probabilistic Semantic Communication with Rate Splitting
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

In this paper, the energy efficient design for probabilistic semantic communication (PSC) system with rate splitting multiple access (RSMA) is investigated. Basic principles are first reviewed to show how the PSC system works to extract, compress and transmit the semantic information in a task-oriented transmission. Subsequently, the process of how multiuser semantic information can be represented, compressed and transmitted with RSMA is presented, during which the semantic compression ratio (SCR) is introduced to directly measure the computation overhead in a transmission task, and communication overhead is indirectly described as well. Hence, the problem of wireless resource allocation jointly considering the computation and communication consumption for the PSC system with RSMA is investigated. Both conventional wireless resource constraints and unique constraints on semantic communication are considered to maximize the energy efficiency (EE). Simulation results verify the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.
Reporting Eye-Tracking Data Quality: Towards a New Standard
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Eye-tracking datasets are often shared in the format used by their creators for their original analyses, usually resulting in the exclusion of data considered irrelevant to the primary purpose. In order to increase re-usability of existing eye-tracking datasets for more diverse and initially not considered use cases, this work advocates a new approach of sharing eye-tracking data. Instead of publishing filtered and pre-processed datasets, the eye-tracking data at all pre-processing stages should be published together with data quality reports. In order to transparently report data quality and enable cross-dataset comparisons, we develop data quality reporting standards and metrics that can be automatically applied to a dataset, and integrate them into the open-source Python package pymovements (https://github.com/aeye-lab/pymovements).